Row over animal drug risk to people

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A Federal Government agency will ban the use of an animal
antibiotic as a growth promoter but has stopped short of a total
ban, despite a finding that the drug has the potential to trigger
severe resistance to antibiotics in humans.

After a four-year review of the drug, virginiamycin, the
Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority has found
a "very low" risk of it generating antibiotic resistance in animals
that could be spread to humans in infected meat.

But an authority spokesman, Martin Holmes, said that if the
antibiotic resistance did spread to vulnerable patients, the
"likely impact on people requiring treatment with related
antibiotics would be severe".

Virginiamycin has been used to boost growth in cattle, pigs and
poultry. Under the new rules it will be prescribed by veterinarians
only for livestock diseases. The drug is in the same class of
antibiotics as medicines "of last resort" - when humans suffer
infections resistant to more common antibiotics.

The European Union banned its use in animals in 1999 and it is
under review in the US because of the human resistance
concerns.

A long-time critic of routine antibiotic dosing of animals,
Peter Collignon, has described the authority's green light to its
continued use as "disconcerting". He said it highlighted a flaw in
the regulatory process, where a government agency dealing with
agricultural chemicals made decisions with implications for human
health.

Professor Collignon, an infectious disease specialist at Sydney
University and the Australian National University, said the
decision would still mean that huge volumes of the antibiotic would
be used in food animals, despite no convincing evidence that it
lowered animal mortality.

The decision would still mean its widespread use. "This will
lead to increasing numbers of resistant bacteria in the foods we
all eat, and potentially also jeopardise export trades in meat," he
said.

However, the deputy chairman of a panel that advised the
authority on human antibiotic resistance, John Turnidge, said risks
to humans from virginiamycin use, "as far as we could judge, would
be negligible". He said the veterinary agricultural regulators were
"highly tuned" to human health considerations.

The distributor of virginiamycin in Australia, Phibro Animal
Health, said it had already stopped selling the product as a growth
promoter and its use in Australia had been reduced substantially in
recent years.